I was thinking about…

Our Parents’ Lives Before Us

By Andy Lee

I recently came across Josie Balka’s poem “Your Parents Weren’t Always Parents” and it really made me pause and reflect in a way I hadn’t before. Sure, on an intellectual level we all realize our parents existed as regular individuals prior to becoming mom and dad. But Balka’s words almost felt like a gentle shaking, jolting awake a deeper empathy for their pre-parental identities we rarely ponder.

Your parents weren’t always parents. There was a time when no one called them Mom and Dad. They made simple mistakes that wouldn’t echo for generations. They didn’t know each other; they didn’t know you. They questioned how their life would turn out.

Your parents lived in another world before you shaped it into something different entirely. They look back and miss their past with the same deep ache that you feel when you look back and miss yours. The difference being that your whole life has been them, but for them there wasn’t always you.

And sometimes parents say things like “my life began when you were born”. And it’s hard to imagine a day that you were not here to see. But your parents have montages spin through their minds of a simpler time and a life that is so different than anything you have been a part of with them.

And every day that you spend learning and growing and aging and figuring it out they have done the same. The people you look to for answers once had none. And they didn’t know each other, and they didn’t know you, they didn’t know anything. They were just people unsure of it all.

And yes, you are their whole world but you’re not their whole life. And it’s a weird thought to wrap your head around because it’s hard to believe the first snow falls, and Christmas mornings, and house phone calls, and warm summer nights aren’t the same ones that you remember so fondly, those are the ones they gave you. But they have their own. Your parents weren’t always parents, they weren’t always your Mom and Dad.

• Josie Balka (@josiebalka on TikTok)

From a child’s perspective, it’s remarkably easy to forget our parents enjoyed whole entire existences before we arrived and reshaped their realities forever. We’re the centers of their contemporary universes for sure. But as Balka so beautifully reminds, entire chapters preceded our cameos gracing their storied lives.

Our progenitors once indulged youthful seasons of aimless self-discovery while we remained celestial whatifs. Unfettered by family responsibilities, they wandered labyrinthine courses seeking life purposes we’d eventually become, yet remained totally unknown back then. Mistakes got made without generational echoes. Bonds formed and faded long before our times commenced. Whole eras of wistful questioning persisted without our steadying security net.

In retrospect, it’s almost poignant pondering mom and dad’s nomadic premakings unencumbered by our existences. Not superior or diminished, simply complete within themselves navigating Phoenix flights preceding our arrivals. We inherit their journeyed wisdoms, but never quite access those interim blank slates pregnant with unshaped possibility.

Which isn’t to undervalue our roles in reshaping their tales into nurturing universes. Of course embarking on parenthood’s hero journeys precipitated seismic awakenings existentially for our elders! Our genesis’s redefined their orbits altogether. And yet…could incarnating as forevers reshape their pasts in nostalgic amber hues too?

Seriously, how wild realizing your very arrival onto earth’s plane represented the point where two human strangers’ timelines unwittingly merged to finally intersect yours? We witness solitary branches intermingle and fuse, pruning bygones altogether while reinventing life’s fundaments anew daily.

So while their parental priorities now remain utterly resolving around us, part of maturing means appreciating those pre-birth montages too. Mom and dad’s “simpler” idealism and uncertainty held anchors charting destined rendezvous with eventual horizons – even if just unshapen silhouettes at time. Our arrivals represented felicitous crescendos already lifetimes underway internally for decades beforehand.

Yet within that rearview reverie lies immense poignance underscoring Balka’s point: regardless their lives’ unwavering parental nuclei nowadays, we never replace the totality of their human beings. Pre-us pasts endure, embodying entire complete lives unto themselves finally cross-pollinating our own emergences, yet never abandoned completely. We arrive not displacing essences already weathered through internal cosmoses’ rotations. Instead, we wake the call igniting persona’s most heroic phoenix flights – lights illuminating new dawns refracted through lenses forged long, long ago.

So while we cherish sacred roles anchoring their identities securely today, pause to ponder originating chapterss where we remained astral myths awaiting earth’s hellos. Those odysseys preceded us yet scripted our eventual rendezvous flawlessly. It’s fitting then we honor parental matriarch and patriarchs’ legacies beyond motherhood and fatherhood’s summits alone…chasing their echoed trails extending further back towards individuated apexes already achieved before our dawn’s whistles blew beckoning latest lives reborn.

Check out more of Josie’s poetic musings on her TikTok (@josiebalka). Her perspective-shifting way with words inspires me to find magic in the “before times” preceding present’s familiar embrace. I have a hunch you’ll resonate too!

Stay introspective, keep learning! 💡